2018 - WAEC Literature Past Questions and Answers - page 2

Hamartia is a personal error in a protagonist's personality, which brings about his tragic downfall in a tragedy. 

The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. 

a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings.

The definition of an interlude is a pause in something, such as a play, or is an intervening period of time in between two other things. A break in between your morning and afternoon work is an example of an interlude. An intermission between two acts of a play is an example of an interlude.

The phrase pathetic fallacy is a literary term for the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things found in nature that are not human. It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent. 

Personification is a form of figurative language in which something that is not human is given human characteristics. This device is often used in poetry to enhance the meaning and beauty of poems.

Alliteration is a literary device where two or more words in a phrase or line of poetry share the same beginning consonant sound. The words may be adjacent or separated by one or more words

The sonnet is split in two groups: the "octave" (of 8 lines) and the "sestet" (of 6 lines), for a total of 14 lines. The octave (the first 8 lines) typically introduces the theme or problem using a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA

The "meter" of a poem just describes the pattern (if there is one) of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line—in other words, the rhythm of the words. "Iambic" describes one particular type of pattern that happens to be particularly common in English poetry. An iamb is a two-syllable pair, consisting of an unstressed syllable that's followed by a stressed syllable. (If you say "allow" out loud, you'll hear an iamb. It sounds like da-DUM.)